My story was primarily about my business experience with APL. Personally, I
find APL to be one of a class of languages that elicits a wider variety of
responses than most others.
My own introduction to APL was in a cross sectional computer language course
that covered 10-15 languages in moderate depth over one semester. The school
trucked in a brace of 2741's and comm gear to connect to an out-of-state APL
system just for this course. I had already been through a number of
cross-disciplinary courses covering computational techniques for medical,
statistical and game and set theoretic applications, but we had used FORTRAN as
the primary language for these courses.
I personally found the math-related symbology of APL quite natural and a major
aid in my learning the fundamentals of the language.
However, I later had the dubious pleasure of trying to teach folks at work
programming in general and APL specifically. I found that some people did not
share my enthusiasm for the APL symbology and that many of these folks found it
a positive barrier for their learning.
However, I also found a number people for whom I was unable to communicate the
basic concepts of APL as a language. I make no claims to be a particularly
proficient teacher, but my suspicion was that at least some of these folks were
not of the bent of mind to appreciate APL, even though many of them were able to
become reasonably skilled in other computer languages. One of the APLS we were
using for some of this training had an alternate set of ASCII-only entry and
display abbreviations. The ASCII only option did not seem to help my students,
which may be more of a commentary about my teaching skills than of the benefits
of a traditional character set.
On 4/12/2013 10:02, Devon McCormick wrote:
Perhaps the "funny symbols" are not important to someone with a "few dozen"
languages under his belt, but most people are not in that category and no
novices are. Speaking from my personal experience, the APL character set
has continued to cause me problems even years after the last time I
programmed in it: an old paper of mine was recently re-printed in Vector,
requiring a couple of hours of work for me and the editor to get the
function listings to display properly, even though I had a PDF version of
it.
I very much like the APL character set but I have decades of experience
telling me it introduces an extra hassle when working with the language,
particularly for presentation.
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 3:53 PM, David Mitchell <[email protected]>wrote:
I'll throw in a comment/story that is mostly true. I was hired at a large
company many years ago. One of my assignments was to eliminate APL usage,
which was seen as overly expensive and not in the preferred company
direction. At the time, APL was probably the most widely used language in
the company.
I succeeded in my assignment to eliminate APL after many decades of work
in 2007. I suspect that there were pockets of continuing APL usage via the
PC versions of APL (or J).
There are many reasons why APL was so difficult to eliminate. In my
opinion, these are mostly the same reasons that led to APL being, from many
points of view, one of the most important computer languages and
implementation environments in this company for many years.
From what I saw of the adoption and later decline of APL usage, the APL
symbols were fairly far down on the list of the reasons for or against the
usage of APL at this company.
In a way, this current discussion of symbology reminds me of the
internecine battles in the past over the theoretical correctness of various
implementations of enclosure.
I will say my reasons for using both APL and J (and the dozen or so other
languages I use regularly) have not much to do with their usage of
symbolics or keywords. After learning the first few dozen languages, I
find that these differences are not very important to me.
On 4/11/2013 14:56, Björn Helgason wrote:
On Apr 11, 2013 5:47 PM, "Joey K Tuttle" <[email protected]> wrote:
I have been tempted, several times, to make one comment and that is a
feeling that the APL character set was perhaps the single most important
reason for lack of widespread acceptance and use of APL...
I believe you are right.
PS: A comment like that to c.l.a would not be popular.
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